


Time, Wasted

by Page161of180



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mayakovsky's time-travelling consciousness-swap spell, One Last Time, angst and longing, but the author likes to think, if it was all ending, missing moment, set during 4x12, that there may be some small measure of peace in here, this is not a 4x13 fix it, tucked in the edges of what canon chose to give us, what would you want to see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 17:12:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18503413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Page161of180/pseuds/Page161of180
Summary: Quentin spared one more guilty look at Eliot-then before shuffling his way back toward the stairs. Eliot-now couldn’t blame the little Romeo, even as he felt the sudden rigidness of Eliot-then’s back in his own spine.“Serves you right,” he muttered, sympathy and pity both failing. He started to turn to leave, the way he should have done (shouldn’t have) earlier. But he was waylaid, once again, when Quentin grabbed hard at the banister, his knees going out from under him for a moment. Eliot moved toward Quentin, at the same time his past self’s head popped up over the back of the armchair.Neither of them proved necessary. Quentin righted himself on his own. But his eyes darted around the cottage, like he was trying to get his bearings. They looked right through the real Eliot.The remembered Eliot was a different story, however.With help from Mayakovsky's spell and a mind palace, Quentin and Eliot (almost) share a final moment before the end.





	Time, Wasted

**Author's Note:**

> I've been playing around with this idea since we learned about Mayakovsky's spell to swap consciousness with your past self. I know other writers have played with the trope, so this marks my contribution, posted just before the buzzer sounds and the season finale airs. In my mind, this story takes place during a missing moment in 4x12, sometime after Quentin and Alice have their moment on the couch, but before they arrive at the Library ready for the final fight. The portions in Eliot's mind palace/prison take place at a corresponding time, although neither I (nor Eliot) fully understand how time works in there. The memory that both Quentin and Eliot access is set in late season 1, sometime after Mike dies (because, no, I'm not done writing about that yet) but before the emotion bottles. 
> 
> My emotional touch points when writing this story were two. First, the song "Switching Off" by Elbow, which I've always interpreted to be about a person choosing the final memory they would want to replay before the end. And second, Thornton Wilder's play Our Town-- specifically, its insistence that if you went back and rewatched a day of your life, it would kill you to realize how much you took for granted. Let those be your guideposts in the level of angst and longing you can expect ahead. The angst is there, but I find some peace in it, as well. I hope you find the same. 
> 
> Finally, for anyone who clicks this before the finale airs tonight: godspeed.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> UPDATE [WITH SPOILERS FOR 4x13, LIKE FOR-REAL SPOILERS]: 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> As the above note makes clear, this story was posted before 4x13. Given the narrative choice that was made in 4x13, I redouble what I said before about this story being an effort to find some peace in despair. I'll be honest with you: I wrote this piece with a suspicion that the show was going to 'kill off' Eliot or (I thought, more likely) Quentin, but it never once occurred to me that the show would choose to do so permanently, and without offering a single moment for these characters who loved each other so deeply for so long to connect or even see each other one last time, before drawing the veil between them. I've read the interview with the showrunners that claims that the approach they chose reflects reality, but frankly, and with apologies for the language, fuck that. Because yes, in reality, we do lose people, even tremendously good-hearted people like Quentin, unexpectedly and with no chance for closure. That's true. But you know what else is true? Sometimes we lose the people that we love when we and/or they are old and gray and we've had the time to prepare, even though we're never truly prepared. And sometimes even when the loss is far earlier than any kind world could allow, we are still in a good place with that person, when we lose them. All of the foregoing is simply to say, that there is no path of utmost suffering (and, I'll just say it, utmost suffering *for queer characters in particular*) that represents artistic truth, however the showrunners wish to spin this. Reality contains multitudes, and what the show depicts comes down to a narrative choice. And the choice that the showrunners made in 4x13 was to depict an almost unbearably tender-hearted person who struggled with depression and suicidal tendencies his entire life dying at the age of what? Twenty-five? for no clearer reason than because they thought it was edgy storytelling. And then to make the person that character loved, a queer man who has had to literally create himself out of the ashes of the abuse he has suffered, and who spent an entire season punishing himself for running away when his entire life trained him to do just that, lose him, with no hope of ever making things right or even saying 'I'm sorry' or even just spending one more minute with the soulmate he was too understandably afraid to keep. And, perhaps most callous of all, to shoehorn that story of almost unthinkable loss into montages and dropped plot threads and a single image of a peach tossed in a fire. 
> 
> I reject it. I reject it, unequivocally. I hate it, and I will not be placated on this point. Whenever the words come, I aspire to write better stories for these characters, ones that choose to do more than punish them and call it bravery. But until that point, I cling to this little story, and the hope it brings that, even if we didn't see it, these characters who care for each other so deeply did get just a little more time by each other's side in the margins of the canon we were given-- and that it wasn't wasted, not for them, not for us, not for the narrative. If there's any peace in that image, I hope that it will find you.

  
  
  


_ “Q. I don’t think we have time for this . . .” _

 

_ Quentin swallowed the sharp sting of irritation, as he looped and tied another end of the string in the stupid-ass pattern that Mayakovsky had designed. “Just-- I’ll be quick, okay? I just. I have to do this. I need to.” _

 

_ Alice’s mouth twisted unhappily, but she nodded. Quentin tried not to think of it as taking advantage, the way everything between them was too tentative for her to come out and say how bad an idea she obviously thought this was.  _

 

_ “Could you just-- make sure you actually wipe his-- my-- memory this time, okay?” _

 

_ He hadn’t meant it as a dig, but Alice flinched anyway. He wondered what it meant that the guilt at seeing her wounded eyes couldn’t fully displace his discomfort at wondering what she and his past consciousness would get up to while he-- _

 

_ Fuck it. There’d be time to think about that later (maybe). He took a breath in and began. _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Hey.  _ Hey _ . You.  _ Up _ . Now!”

 

Eliot punctuated each command-- because a king doesn’t  _ request _ , even when he no longer has a crown to speak of, or his own body to speak of it  _ with _ \-- with a jab to the sleeping knight’s shoulder. But then the cottage shook violently again and the final jab landed closer to his Adam’s apple.

 

“ _ Fuck _ !”

 

The corner of Eliot’s mouth curled up at the (literally) strangled expletive, even as the rattling of the walls picked up enough to send a full shelf of books clattering to the seesawing floorboards. “You really do seem to have gotten the knack for that.”

 

Charlton looked at him suspiciously as he rubbed his throat through the high, shiny collar of what Eliot was sure was once the height of leaving-on-home-on-an-ill-fated quest fashion. “Is it getting worse?”

 

Eliot simply nodded, letting the groaning legs of the sofa on which Charlton was huddled speak for him, as the floor beneath them shifted once again, in time with the rolling thunder that shook the window panes.

 

“We should--” Charlton began, just as Eliot decreed, “I need you to tell me everything about the moment the monster possessed you.”

 

Charlton recoiled. The sudden shifting of his weight threw the couch further off balance, and Eliot grabbed onto the arm to keep it from sliding down the suddenly sharply inclined floorboards.

 

“ _ No _ !” Charlton said, loud and emphatic as he always was, head shaking. “Why would you want to--”

 

“ _ Because _ ,” Eliot interrupted, keeping direct eye contact-- it was so much harder for people, especially the loud and emphatic ones, to say no when Eliot spoke levelly and maintained direct eye contact-- “in case you haven’t noticed, things are getting fairly apocalyptic out there.”

 

Two more books-- heavy ones-- fell off the wall to punctuate Eliot’s point, just as another bout of hail began to pelt the roof. 

 

“I don’t know what that fucker is doing out there,” Eliot continued, “but _this_ \--” he let his eyes survey the room, from bucking floor to battered ceiling-- “feels a hell of a lot like we’re moving toward the endgame. And I for one would like to know how to push him _out_ of my goddamn body before we get there.” 

 

Charlton was sighing. Of course he was; he was petulant and defeatist, and God help Eliot, but he’d actually grown something close to fond of the incessant doomsday prophesying, in spite of himself. “There’s no way--”

 

“I know, I know,” Eliot said, “ _ there’s no way to take control long enough _ .” He could recite Charlton’s lines for him at this point, and it was usually quicker if he  _ did _ . “But if there  _ is  _ a way, I want to be ready. Which is why I want to know everything about how this dickhole bodyhops. So.  _ Tell me what you remember _ .”

 

Charlton looked guiltily down at his own hands. “I-- don’t remember.  _ How  _ it happened,” he admitted. “Just-- arriving at its castle. Then. In here.”

 

“ _ Shit _ .” Eliot let go of the couch arm-- which he’d still been gripping-- just long enough to ball his hand into a fist and bring it down  _ hard _ on the cushion. 

 

“You don’t remember, either.” Charlton didn’t pose it at a question. They’d both had a lot of time--  _ too much fucking time _ \-- to get to know the other, apparently.

 

Eliot just sat heavily on the floor, trying to ignore the way it lurched, his back against the same couch arm he’d been holding on to earlier. “If I did, would I have bothered with something as futile as trying to pull real information out of you?”

 

“No,” Charlton answered, slow and considered. Eliot laughed in spite of-- oh, everything. The concept of rhetorical questions was still an area for improvement, apparently, even if great strides had been made in recreational cursing. 

 

As the cottage-- Eliot tried not to think,  _ his own mind _ \-- continued to shake apart around him, he closed his eyes and breathed out. It was  _ frustrating _ \-- to put it obscenely mildly-- being trapped in here, being forced to just  _ wait _ . He’d tried to keep up the pretense of usefulness, scavenging through the monster’s capital-T Trauma for something that could help his friends. But the monster’s memories were closed down to him now, had been since the ground-shaking storm had moved in. And even the pretty fucking major bombshells Eliot had been able to uncover when he  _ did  _ have access to monster-brain had only come to anything (assuming they  _ had _ ) because his friends just happened to send Penny-23 into the monster’s head long enough for Eliot to flag him down. With the door through his worst memory closed ( _ no matter how many times Eliot had gone back _ ), Eliot was a glorified damsel, waiting in his crumbling tower for his friends to rescue him. Assuming they weren’t a little preoccupied with saving the world from whatever the universe’s most homicidal toddler and his A-bomb sister were doing. Assuming they were still--

 

Eliot squeezed his eyes tighter to stop himself from thinking it, but it just made the images more vivid. Margo,  _ Bambi _ , eyes unseeing and crown askew. And  _ Quentin _ \--

 

Eliot pushed himself up, staggering across the unsteady ground to the door of the cottage. 

 

“You can’t go out there!” Charlton yelled, without moving from his sofa. “And even if you could, you said you don’t remember it!”

 

“That doesn’t mean it’s not  _ here _ ,” Eliot muttered, bracing himself against the wall as a particularly major tremor hit. 

 

“You have no way of finding it!” Charlton answered, yelling over the collective whining of every nail and screw in the building. “If you wander around looking for it, they’ll tear you apart.  _ Especially _ now!”

 

But Eliot had finally made it to the front door, landing against it hard after pushing himself off of the wall. He felt for the doorknob, and didn’t bother to take a moment to say goodbye, if this was the last time, just closed his eyes, concentrated hard, and  _ yanked _ .

  
  
  
  


When Eliot opened his eyes, he was . . . right back in the physical cottage. 

 

_ Oh shit. It hadn’t worked _ .

 

The disappointment was so consuming, that it took him a moment to register that the floor and the walls and the roof of the cottage were  _ still _ . And there were people-- not just an ever-griping Ren Faire reject or the occasional ghosts of Bambis past, but a smattering of dumbass half-drunk physical kids on their way out the door, virtually none of whom mattered enough to him to bother imagining into his so-called happy place. 

 

And there, in the chair by the fireplace, the dumbest-ass physical kid of them all-- well more than  _ half  _ drunk, and no one that Eliot would ever choose, consciously or not, to have to see again. 

 

Eliot let out a sigh. So he  _ had _ made his way back to a memory. Just not the memory he needed.

 

He slipped through the main room, making his way to the figure in the chair. There was a bottle in his hand, and a long-since abandoned glass on the floor beside the absently jerking foot. His eyelids were drooping, but not enough to hide the fact that the so-called whites of his eyes were closer to red, and that his pupils were dilated and all but swimming. They couldn’t seem to focus on anything for more than a moment.

 

_ Poor bastard _ .

 

Eliot might have had some more--  _ choice  _ words for this particular vintage of himself, once. But since the search for a door had forced him to watch his past self stagger from bad decision to even worse decision, barely able to keep his head upright, let alone together, he’d developed something almost like--  _ sympathy _ . ( _ For the devil. _ )

 

The memory of his younger self giggled at nothing, the bored, snorting sound as thin and as high as he was, and Eliot felt his own jaw clench. 

 

Well. Perhaps  _ pity _ was closer to the truth than  _ sympathy _ .

 

Whichever it was, it certainly didn’t warrant another minute watching memories he hadn’t particularly wanted to live through the first time around, and had no power to change now. Not when that time could be spent tracking down literally any half-baked idea with even the remotest chance of turning up something that could help his friends.  _ Nothing  _ in here could be worth more than that.

 

Except. 

 

Eliot’s hand was inches away from the cottage door when he heard the footsteps on the staircase behind him. Shuffling and unevenly paced, like the person they belonged to was so focused on wherever he was going that it made him forget the hurry he was in every three steps, or four, until his brain rebooted itself again. The jerking stop-start of it was made all the more dangerous by the fact that (Eliot  _ knew _ , without even turning around) at least one and probably both of his fucking tragic Converse were untied. 

 

They always were. 

 

Eliot didn’t let himself turn around, closed his eyes as the memory passed him on the landing, close enough that Eliot could feel the remembered warmth of his broad chest, smell the memory of that damned body spray that he had worn with no trace of irony, like the hopeless hetero that-- at that point, anyway-- Eliot could be forgiven for assuming he was. Alice, bless her heart, must have been either a saint or a kinkier bitch than Eliot had given her credit for to let Quentin roll his eau de frat house all over her sweet little embroidered sheet sets.  _ Eliot _ , he’d told Margo-- because it was a thing he did then, the jokes about all the ways he would seduce little Q, forcing the gnawing desire out into the harsh light of day to be laughed at, so it couldn’t grow into more, in the dark lonely corners where it thrived--  _ Eliot  _ would have insisted upon a shower before letting Quentin anywhere  _ near  _ his own bed.  _ If you want to blow the poor kid in the shower, just say so,  _ Bambi had drawled. And Eliot- _ then  _ had bristled, given a look intended as withering, and muttered about the sanctity of his tastefully musky sheets.

 

Eliot- _ now  _ breathed in deeply, and held it.

 

There was no time for this. He knew that. He reached forward and gripped the doorknob, thought carefully about the tendons of his wrist and the simple task of twisting. There had  _ never  _ been any time for this, he reminded himself. Not really. At first, because there literally  _ was no time  _ inside the monster’s prison. But now, because whatever substitute for time  _ did  _ exist here, it was clearly ending. Dawdling in his memories, when he’d first arrived here, had been dangerous-- because if ever a person was weak enough to lose himself in the memory of a good ( _ the best _ ) thing instead of fighting his way back to it, it was Eliot Goddamned Waugh. Under the  _ new  _ regime, when his life or the world or both could dissolve at any moment, dawdling was just fucking irresponsible.  

 

It should have been no surprise, then, that Eliot released the doorknob with a sigh. And turned. And faced the memory of Quentin one more ( _ last _ ) time.

 

Maybe it was the elastic around Quentin’s wrist. Or the way one flapping end of his checkered shirt was half-tucked into his shapeless jeans. It could have been the way he bit the inside of his cheek as he scoured the couch cushions for something he’d lost, or the way he rose up on his toes to reach as he dug behind the pillow. It was, maybe, the way his hair hung in his eyes or the way he muttered  _ shit  _ as he caught his finger on a couch spring, or the way the hand he was shaking out had felt against Eliot’s temple, tracing silver hairs as Eliot caught his breath and tried not to think about the stamina he’d had a decade earlier, or how easy it had been, once, to fuck someone and  _ not _ need to feel their weight curled against his chest for actual hours. Maybe it was the way that Eliot’s plastered younger self watched Quentin’s every movement, drinking him in more deeply than the almost-empty whiskey. Or maybe it was just that Eliot  _ loved  _ him and  _ missed  _ him and was grasping greedy onto seconds he didn’t have, when he’d had an actual lifetime in his hands once and thrown it all away. Whatever the reason, Eliot fell back against the door, a hand fluttering over the slippery richness of his tie, all too aware of how little the way he looked at Quentin had changed in a couple of years, or fifty.

 

Over by the couch, Quentin finally pulled a notebook, cover now pretty well mangled, out from behind a pillow. As he tried ineffectually to flatten it against the line of his thighs, he caught sight of then-Eliot, half-falling off his armchair, before then-Eliot could peel his eyes away. Quentin looked down at his feet, as then-Eliot looked back to the fire. 

 

Now-Eliot, the real Eliot, could see the options play out across Quentin’s face. Check on his self-immolating friend, lose minutes or hours, for non-specific rambling vitriol at best and a sharp bite to any hand foolish enough to attempt feeding at worst? Or leave Eliot to his demons--the ones that, yeah, were out in force because of something Eliot had done to protect Quentin himself, but which had taken up residence long before-- and go back to whatever waited for him up the stairs? His notes, or--  _ ah _ . Quentin pushed his hair back behind his ear, and Eliot felt like an idiot for not connecting the dots sooner. Of course. Go back upstairs for more of the little Alice-sized nips just below his ear. 

 

(They were delicate, Eliot noticed. Precise, and sharp. Nothing like the sprawling suckmarks that he remembered blemishing Quentin’s neck and collarbones-- occasionally-- in another world.  _ Only  _ occasionally. It was a fine pastime, but Eliot had never had much time for diversions when his mouth on Quentin’s mouth was a possibility.)

 

Quentin spared one more guilty look at Eliot-then before shuffling his way back toward the stairs. Eliot-now couldn’t blame the little Romeo, even as he  _ felt _ the sudden rigidness of Eliot-then’s back in his own spine. 

 

“Serves you right,” he muttered, sympathy and pity both failing. He started to turn to leave, the way he should have done ( _ shouldn’t have _ ) earlier. But he was waylaid, once again, when Quentin grabbed hard at the banister, his knees going out from under him for a moment. Eliot moved toward Quentin, at the same time his past self’s head popped up over the back of the armchair. 

 

Neither of them proved necessary. Quentin righted himself on his own. But his eyes darted around the cottage, like he was trying to get his bearings. They stopped on the notebook in his hand, almost as if they were surprised to find it there. They looked right through the real Eliot-- all the memories did, unless and until he interposed himself unavoidably.

 

The remembered Eliot was a different story, however. 

 

When Quentin noticed the dark curls barely visible over the back of the chair, his face went slack for the space of a second, before his dark eyebrows pulled together painfully. Then he was on his way across the room, to the two chairs in front of the fire, moving like he was in a daze, barely missing the drink cart,  _ not _ missing the leg of a coffee table. The hit didn’t phase him. Nothing did, until he stopped just behind the empty chair beside past-Eliot’s. He set the notebook down on an end table then dug his fingers into the upholstered back, hard enough that the real Eliot, who’d followed him helplessly, could see indentations in the leather. 

 

Eliot-then looked up to meet Quentin’s eyes slowly, blinking languidly once they hit their mark.

 

Quentin inhaled sharply, then arranged his mouth into a smile. “ _ Hey _ ,” he said, voice soft but bright, _ fortified _ \-- the way he would make it, sometimes, when he was afraid it would be too unsteady otherwise. “Could I, um. Could I sit with you for a minute?”

 

Eliot-then’s eyes narrowed in suspicion-- or maybe just in exhaustion; it was possible  _ he  _ didn’t even know the difference. But he nodded all the same. 

 

“Far be it from me to deprive you of the pleasure of my  _ excellent  _ company.” 

 

_ Excellent  _ came out slurred, and another of those soulless giggles swallowed the final world. But Quentin nodded earnestly. He walked around the chair and settled himself into the empty seat. He tucked his knees into his chest, resting his sneakers on the leather upholstery, which wasn’t a surprise. But he also twisted himself in the seat so that he was turned, whole body, toward Eliot, which--  _ was _ , a bit. 

 

Past-Eliot seemed to agree. “D’you need--?” he half-asked, thrusting the bottle out toward Quentin with dangerously unsteady hands-- well, dangerous if there had been anything but fumes left to spill.

 

Quentin just shook his head. “I’m okay.” 

 

Past-Eliot drew his hand back, clearly uncertain about this development. His whole torso curved, just for a moment, to make himself a matching parenthesis for Quentin. But then he forced his feet to the floor and his ass to the seat, facing forward, eyes on the dying fire.

 

_ Coward _ , Eliot wanted to cry. He settled for curling his own self on the floor by Quentin’s feet, where he could stare up at Q’s face, as Q watched Eliot’s younger self. 

 

The remembered warmth of the fire licked Eliot’s skin. Its remembered light painted shadows across Quentin’s face, flickered in the chocolate brown of his crinkled eyes. 

 

_ I could have had this forever _ , Eliot thought. 

 

But Eliot-then barely allowed himself to look. 

 

Quentin burrowed his cheek and ear more deeply into the cushion, still not turning away. The rustling of his hair against the leather was, at last, more than even past-Eliot could ignore. He cut his eyes over to Quentin, like it would hurt to look full on. He obviously intended for the glance to last just a moment-- Eliot remembered what it was like, then, and after, and for fifty years, always intending it to last just another moment-- but he got stuck. Couldn’t look away. Couldn’t look right  _ at  _ Quentin, either. Just sat frozen, staring out of the corner of his raw, red eyes. 

 

The sympathy that Eliot had failed to muster before came easily now.  _ We have it right now _ , he thought.  _ Even if we never-- we have it now, at the last. _

 

Pretzeled up in his chair, Quentin’s brow furrowed. “You really weren’t okay, were you?” he murmured, nonsensically. “I didn’t-- how didn’t I see it?”

 

Eliot-then, less finely attuned to intricacies of tense or even the basics of speech, really, just snorted, looking back to the fire. “Who’d want to look?”

 

Quentin didn’t say anything. But he didn’t move, either.

 

Eliot’s past self let his head roll back against the seat then, slowly, until, finally, he was looking right at Quentin, eyes water-bright in the firelight. And it was no wonder he’d avoided looked for as long as he had, with the way his face crumpled in on itself the moment his eyes met Quentin’s. “I killed Mike,” he admitted, even though they both already knew.

 

Q’s eyes turned down even further at the corners. “You didn’t have a choice,” he soothed.

 

Past-Eliot shrugged one shoulder. “No. But that’s not the worst part.” He closed his eyes, briefly. No one but him would have known about the tear that slipped out when he did, if it weren’t for the way it reflected the light. “He was  _ possessed _ ,” he said after a moment, voice thready and lost. Eliot-now could feel the scratch of the words in his own throat. “He was possessed, and I didn’t even know.” 

 

Eliot didn’t think, often, of Mike, anymore. But in that moment, with the memory of his younger self’s words in the throat that wasn’t really his, anymore, and the memory of tears on the cheeks that weren’t really his, anymore, he felt a flash of kinship for the lovely young man whose body had been used without permission to turn Eliot into the very easiest mark.

 

In his chair, Quentin seemed to struggle with the younger-Eliot’s confession. For the first time since he’d noticed past-Eliot, he looked away, tugging at the elastic on his wrist, twisting it so that it must have cut at his circulation, then letting it snap back against the thin skin. He snapped the band a second time, then looked up to meet past-Eliot’s eyes. 

 

“It’s only because you didn’t know him. Before,” he said, voice serious and low. “If-- if you’d loved him first . . .” he trailed off, then took a gulping little breath. “You’d know the difference. You’d always know.” 

 

The young Quentin’s words made something inside Eliot’s ribs fold in on itself and  _ ache _ . But the younger Eliot, that Quentin’s counterpart, just nodded, quiet. He didn’t say anything more, and Eliot-now expected him to turn away again. But he didn’t. He let his head fall even more heavily against the back of the chair, but kept his eyes locked on Quentin’s. 

 

The two young men sat there, turned to each other, not speaking, not touching, just holding gazes. And Eliot wasn’t sure  _ why  _ exactly, he’d been taken to this memory, or even how he’d forgotten  _ this  _ until he’d walked through the cottage door. He was just glad that he  _ was  _ here, at last. Even at the end of the world. 

 

The crackling of the fire and the steady whisper of their breaths were the only sound in the room for so long, that the dainty foot steps on the stairs, walking down just far enough to see the tableau before the fire, then climbing quickly back up, were jarring. Eliot-now, from his spot on the floor, was the only one who saw the person who’d made them, her glasses off, and one of Q’s hoodies thrown over her little sleep shorts. But the memory-men both seemed to know who it was, who it had to have been, even without seeing.

 

“You should head back up to her,” past-Eliot said softly. 

 

Quentin nodded, but hesitated, reluctant.

 

“Come on, Coldwater,” past-Eliot tried again, his little smile a contrast to his still desperately lost eyes. “Don’t make me a cockblocker, on top of all the rest.” 

 

Eliot-- well, he hadn’t forgotten, exactly. He could never forget. But it had been so long since he’d seen even the memory of Quentin smiling like  _ that _ , the way it curved his eyes and lit his whole face, in ways the fire could only dream of. 

 

“It’s okay,” past-Eliot said even more quietly, when Quentin still didn’t move. “I know you’d rather be up there with her. I don’t blame you.”

 

Quentin’s soft smile fell apart then, for reasons that Eliot couldn’t understand. He nodded, though, even as he seemed to hold back tears. “Will you-- um.”

 

“I’ll be fine,” past-Eliot answered the question Quentin couldn’t quite get out, then smiled gently at his favorite first-year, before turning back to the fire, severing the thread.

 

“You will,” Quentin said seriously. He watched past-Eliot’s profile for a long, last moment, like he was trying to memorize it, before pushing himself to his feet and pacing back to the stairs.

 

He left his notebook on the end table, forgotten.

 

The real Eliot watched Q ascend each step, thirsty for every last sight he could squeeze from this stone. When even the cuffs of his jeans were out of view, Eliot finally pulled himself off of the floor and onto the chair that Quentin had abandoned, still warm from his weight. Beside Eliot, his past self looked over, placid at the site of his apparently hallucinated future self settling in beside him. 

 

“Do me a favor?” Eliot said softly, as he dropped his face to the spot on the leather where Quentin had laid his own. “No more booze tonight. Let’s keep this one.”

 

He only kept his eyes open long enough to watch his past self nod, before letting his lashes fall closed and breathing in.

  
  
  


 

When Eliot opened his eyes, again, he was still curled on the leather chair, but the cottage around him was shaking, the storm outside howling. The fire was out.

 

“What happened? Where did you go?” Charlton had braved the quaking floor and was bent over the arm of Eliot’s chair, shaking his arm. “Did it work?”

 

“You’re awfully invested for someone who told me not to go,” Eliot answered tartly, taking his arm back and rubbing at the abused shoulder. He sighed when Charlton continued to look at him, stubborn-jawed and demanding. “I asked it to show me my last memory,” he explained, taking pity. 

 

“And did it show you the moment the Monster took you?”

 

Eliot shook his head. “No.”

 

Charlton’s sigh was perfectly timed to another clap of thunder. “Then it didn’t work.”

 

Eliot considered. He’d hoped that whatever magic or logic ran this place-- his own mind-- would have taken the command and shown him his most  _ recent  _ memory, before he was locked in here. But. 

 

He thought of the firelight in Quentin’s eyes, the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks, the sound of his voice in a quiet room. Quentin’s smell and his shape and his heart, and the way that sitting at his feet, the loyal hound Eliot could only wish he’d been when it counted, Eliot felt for the first time in all of this mess like he could die content. 

 

His  _ last  _ memory.

 

“Actually,” he said, stroking absently at the cool leather, remembering the ghost of warmth, “I think it gave me exactly what I needed.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

_ Quentin came back to his real body (his older body, fuck he was so worn down, he'd felt younger at 60) with a start. The temperature-controlled air of the penthouse raised goosebumps on his skin, after the almost too-close heat of the roaring fire behind the grate.  _

 

_ Alice was looking at him suspiciously, not in his arms this time, luckily. (Maybe luckily? Maybe that was okay, now?) _

 

_ “Did it work?” she asked, crouching on the floor beside him. _

 

_ Quentin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to hold on to the memory of Eliot’s eyes _ \--  _ his  _ real  _ eyes _ \--  _ red-rimmed and hurt. So hurt. God, he’d been hurting so badly. It crashed over him in waves; he was drowning in it. Quentin, the Quentin he’d been anyway, had barely even noticed, caught as he was between the terror of the beast and the elation of Alice. He would have fetched his notebook that night and walked back upstairs and never given another thought to the way Eliot’s eyes shone, sitting alone by the fire, until the day came that he felt like he’d let worlds die, for one more glimpse. _

 

_ “I wasted so much time,” he mumbled, without meaning to.  _

 

_ “I know,” Alice said. “The monster and his sister are probably already on their way--” _

 

That’s not what I meant,  _ he almost said. But he stopped himself. _

 

_ “Did you at least get what you needed?” Alice was asking.  _

 

_ He looked at her blankly.  _

 

_ “ _ Q,”  _ she repeated. “You said there was something in the physical cottage you needed. Something you had to check on before we go. Did you find it?” _

 

_ A book. He’d told her it was a book, he needed to find-- he’d seen it there once, during their first year. It was important. He had to find it. There was no other way. The monster and his sister were on the loose doing Jesus only knew what, but he they had to stop and do fucking Mayakovsky’s spell. So he could find it. One last time. Before it was all over. Just in case this whole thing ended the way it probably would.  _

 

_ “Did it work?” Alice asked him again. _

 

_ Quentin let his eyes dip closed once more and saw him, the way Quentin had almost forgotten he really was. Damned and beautiful and so much kinder than he was nice. Quentin’s perfect bookend, even when he could just barely meet Quentin’s eyes. One last time.  _

 

_ “Yeah,” he said, nodding, even as he stood so that Alice wouldn’t be able to see his face. “Yeah. I’m ready now. We can go.” _

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. I know it's a rough time right now, so if you want to talk about anything in the comments, know that I am here.


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